As its title suggests, Hot Tub Time Machine is not an adaptation of a story by Dostoevsky, but rather Back to the Future remade as a gross-out comedy. No shortage here of gags to make you gag: in the first reel alone, there is vomit, a leaky catheter and a canine cavity search. Truly our cup runneth over with bodily fluids.

Like the earlier film, it opens in the listless present day. Adam (John Cusack) is an insurance broker whose girlfriend has left him. Nick (Craig Robinson), once an aspiring musician, now works in a pet parlour. Lou (Rob Corddry) is a party animal whose hedonism conceals his loneliness. After Lou has an accident that may have been a suicide attempt, the three men resolve to cast off their midlife funk by recreating their youth. With Adam's nephew Jacob (Clark Duke) tagging along to stop the film being entirely middle-aged, they hit the ski resort where they partied as teenagers in the mid-Eighties. And I'll be damned if there isn't something odd about the hotel Jacuzzi.

A few not-so-special effects later, the pals are returned to the age of leg warmers, feather cuts and barely mobile phones. This is comedy gold as far as the film-makers are concerned, but hardly more inspired than if I asked whether you remember when Snickers bars were called Marathons. Not all the humour hinges on marvelling at bygone fashion crimes and faded celebrities. That said, it's fun to see Chevy Chase, silver-haired now but with smarminess intact, as an oddball handyman. And who among us is above chuckling at an unsavoury reference to Gary Coleman of Diff'rent Strokes?

When it isn't looking back for laughs, the script seizes on cultural disparities between then and now. Jacob is aghast at the prospect of forming a relationship in a pre-texting world. How to contact a girl you like? A potential conquest suggests he could always come and find her. "That sounds exhausting," he sighs.

The steadfast rule of time travel is that you can't so much as swat a gnat in the past without, say, deleting Barack Obama or causing civil war in Tring. So the friends need to ensure that everything which occurred 20 years ago at the resort is replayed exactly as it happened. Lou must offer to fight a bullying jock, and suffer again a humiliating defeat. Nick has to have sex with a groupie, which would be no hardship, were he not distraught at cheating on his future wife, who was only nine years old at the time.

The movie bears the imprint of its star Cusack's New Crime Productions, and is directed by the actor's long-time collaborator Steve Pink, but it feels more cynical than Grosse Pointe Blank, the pair's last comic riff on the Eighties. Hot Tub Time Machine is meticulously commercial, celebrating the lucrative male bonding of "bromances" such as The Hangover and I Love You, Man, as well as the supposedly ironic coarseness that is used to temper that genre's sentimentality. The film also replicates late-Seventies and Eighties sex comedies, as Wet Hot American Summer did before it. But there's a thin line between parodying a genre and subscribing to it, and the movie's attempt to invoke the spirit of Meatballs while aspiring to be a kind of Meta-balls is not always convincing.

Time and again, the picture comes back to Back to the Future, even casting Crispin Glover (who in that film played the hero's father at different stages of his life) as two incarnations of one bellhop. But in the same way as Ambridge never falls silent while residents tune in to The Archers, Back to the Future is the one film incongruously overlooked by these characters, who are usually so quick with movie references. The script might also have acknowledged that the landscape has not changed that drastically in 24 years. Red Dawn, The Karate Kid and the TV series 21 Jump Street are mentioned on screen; remakes of those titles will shortly be joining a film of The A-Team at cinemas. Even Back to the Future is being rereleased this year. All of which renders that hot tub obsolete.

Time travel is already a reality. We just call it the marketplace.